


The Lemniscate Library

by whichstiel



Series: Season 13 Codas [6]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: 13x05, Death, Episode: s13e05 Advanced Thanatology, Gen, Reapers, SPN 13x05, advanced thanatology, episode coda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-31 13:38:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12683007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whichstiel/pseuds/whichstiel
Summary: Billie assumes the mantle of Death.





	The Lemniscate Library

Billie wakes in a shadowed canyon. She groans, blinks, then turns her head slightly to peer at her surroundings. Tall gray walls stretch into black above her. She can see no ceiling, no sky. 

Her chest aches something fierce and she winces and draws her hand up to it. Her shirt is torn and the fabric feels almost brittle. _Dried blood_ , she realizes and pushes herself upright with a start. She tugs at the fabric with suddenly frantic fingers. There’s a small hole, just large enough for the narrower end of an angel blade. A wide circle of stiff blood surrounds it. She slips a fingertip into the hole and probes the skin between her breasts. It’s whole and undamaged. “But I died,” she says and an echo of her voice whispers into the darkness like it’s fleeing her. 

Billie passes a hand slowly over her clothing as the soiled fabric knits whole and clean once more. The echo of her voice has faded entirely now and she swings her legs back and pushes up into a crouch. Her muscles twitch like the haunted corridor holds ravening beasts and the only thing between death and life are her reflexes. _Paranoia. A common side effect of dying._ The clinical analysis of her situation soothes her. 

Slowly she stands up. The ache in her bones has ebbed away now and nothing has leapt out to threaten her. She props her hands on her hips and draws her mouth up into a wry smile. “If anybody’s here, I’m going to explore this place a little. Just so you know.” On either side of her dim gray walls stretch as smooth as metal. It could be a cage or an elaborate hallucination spinning at the knifepoint time of her death, but she won’t know until she starts poking around. 

Billie’s heels clack against the stone floor. She lays a tentative hand against the wall and lights turn on so quickly that she gasps and leaps back. With her arms outflung and her head back, she stares around her in wonder. She’s in a vast room. The gray walls she could just make out from her position on the floor turn out to be wide shelves stretching away from her on either side. The shelves are inlaid with light and there are neat stacks of black books, like journals. She reaches out again and grasps the edge of the nearest shelf. The shelf seems to hum beneath her touch and she feels contentment warm her down to the marrow of her bones. “Oh,” she says, surprised and pleased. She drops her fingers to the top of the nearest stack of books and looks quickly up and down the corridor. _Nobody’s coming,_ she thinks. _Now’s your chance._

Feeling almost unreasonably uncomfortable, like she’s stealing something deeply private, she grabs the top book and flips it open. Her jaw drops. She reads, then looks up and around again. Somewhat reassured by the continued silence, Billie begins to whisper out loud to herself. “But this is a death record.” She’s written uncountable death records herself on skins, then parchment, then paper, then emails addressed simply to “death@”. The records always disappear, sucked into the air in a blaze of light like the records themselves contain a piece of the deceased person’s soul. She’s never seen a death record. 

“This is the library,” she says in wonder. All her long, long life as a reaper and she’d never seen it before. Oh, the library had been rumored. It was supposed to be stacks and stacks of fated writings existing outside of time, available only to Death’s own cold gaze. The library was infinite, a curved lemniscate continuum with no beginning, and no end.

She can feel excitement bubble inside her chest as she reads through the death account. It’s a dry account, something from the twenty second century and… _Oh._

Billie’s fingers trace a line at the bottom of the last page. It’s just a little bit of metadata: name, date, time, place, world. _World._ Billie’s mind wraps around that word. This death record is from another time and another world. Her head snaps up and she looks up at the shelves towering around her. All of these shelves list the death for everyone across every world. She laughs as disbelief and joy threaten to overwhelm her. “Well, this is rich,” she says. As she rolls her chin to look back at the shelves before her she catches a glimpse of the letter on the side of the shelf. It’s a smooth, unadorned letter B. Her brows jump in the air and she returns the death record to its shelf and then runs her fingers down the spines of the books. They’re unmarked but as she glances at each one names spring unbidden to her mind. “Bilough, Bilouz…” Her finger stops. “Biloxby.” Her full, true name. She stares for a moment at it. She woke up just outside of the “B” section...just outside of her own death records. There’s a record lying on the top of the pile and as she lays her hand on it, she swears it’s still warm. 

Billie’s hand trembles. She picks up the book.

The account is written by Greto, a reaper she’s had scant interaction with over the past centuries. Reapers tend to be solitary and often territorial. She met him a few years ago while the world tried to work its way towards an apocalypse, but once that blew past they’d all mostly gone their separate ways. Here, Greto delivers a dry account of Billie’s last confrontation, describing the night and transcribing the conversation she’d had with the Winchesters and her killer. She reads up until the moment the angel blade pierces her light. 

Billie blinks. Rubs at her eyes.

There’s metadata at the end of the account: _Biloxby (Reaper). January 26, 2017. 3:35 a.m. Rocky Mountain National Forest, Colorado, United States, North America. Earth 835,674._

New words appear at the end of it, bursting out of the page as though activated by the act of reading. _SEE ALSO: Death_

Billie drops the book. “Death,” she says loudly, startled. And then she jumps again as her exclamation rattles down the still hallways of the library. She laughs, nervously. “No. No, it can’t be.” She picks up the next book in the stack, also labeled with her name. It reads startlingly similar to the first account. She’s killed by Castiel in defense of the Winchester family. This account has no additional metadata, no _See Also_ references. It lists a different Earth.

Billie pulls out another account. And another. They’re all from different Earths, for the most part, although there’s one from Mars and another from a coordinate within the Milky Way galaxy that she’s pretty sure is empty space stretching between stars. She’s not sure how long she stands there. Time seems to lose its meaning in the library. When she’s finally read through all of her many, many deaths, Billie replaces them all neatly on the shelf. She taps her finger to her lip, considering. Then, still alone in the silence of the library, she strides out and down the corridor. 

The library is seemingly endless, marked only by the varying size of the stacked death records on the shelves and the letters along the wall. Billie travels up and down stairs and ramps until she can no longer be certain if she is higher or lower than before. She finds the letter D and stalks her way to the section of the alphabet that will lead her to “Death”. 

Her hunch pays off. The “Death” shelves span several rows of high-stacked death accounts. These are different than the others. They’re bound in silver as bright as spirit with thick black lettering on the fronts. Each death record lists the name of the reaper who assumed the post of Death, following the passage of the prior reaper. She begins with her predecessor, who pens a sardonic account of the death of a reaper-turned-Death named Sampakiel. He describes the mechanism of Death - how the next reaper to die replaces Death-who-cannot-die. He lovingly describes a cheese filled bread he’d eaten as he visited the scene of her demise to assemble the facts to write the death record and she smirks to read it. She’d only met Death - or Luke (as he’d been called) - once but he had been a bit food obsessed. Each account fills in the gaps of history and Billie reads it all until her mind feels fit to burst.

 _When I die_ , finishes Luke’s record, _another will take my place. And so I shall join this hall of records again, and rest at last._

“So,” Billie murmurs. “There’s my first task.” Her mind feels settled now that she’s had a chance to process this sudden turn of events. She will take on the great mantle of Death, until such time as it is taken from her. Her first act will be to travel back to where and when Luke died and reap his essence so that he may rest at last in the Empty. As though sensing her acceptance of the role, the room lightens and from the floor between the stacks rises a pillar.

The pillar is smooth like stone though when she gets closer she realizes that what looked like flecks of gravel are actually tiny stars pulsing. She runs a gentle hand over the pillar and the stone seems to burble happily under her touch. Billie grins then and plunges her hand into the stone. She reaches in past her wrist, past her forearm, past her elbow, until her shoulder dips into the deceptively narrow pillar. Her hand closes around something firm, cylindrical, and warm. She grabs the object and pulls out the Scythe. It’s night black and gorgeous. As she draws it near to her it seems to whisper to her. _Welcome. I will show you everything. Everything._

“Hello, you beautiful thing,” she croons and her finger, adorned with Death’s own ring, taps against the handle. _Come,_ the scythe whispers. _It is time to learn._

Billie smiles at it and as she strides down the corridor, a new coat ripples from nothing and settles around her shoulders. The coat flies out from her hips like wings, or shadows. Billie prowls the lemniscate stair which comprises the library and, not breaking stride, she steps out of it and back into time. 

The smell of delicately cooked cheese and chicken permeate the abandoned restaurant where Death - Luke - met his end. She surveys the room and its inhabitants as though they’re motionless figurines set upon a shelf. Billie blinks and spacetime exhales in the time it takes for her lashes to meet. Then Dean Winchester drags the Scythe through Luke. Billie steps calmly forward and gathers Luke’s spirit into her arms, before striding off back into the quantum shell. She will deal with the Winchesters later. She has work to do.

Billie walks between the stars and the Scythe whispers to her about endings and beginnings and the beautiful curving patterns of the multiverse. She is ready to learn and to work until her own time comes to pass on the Scythe. _I am become Death,_ she thinks, and rejoices in her purpose.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/whichstiel) and [Tumblr](http://whichstiel.tumblr.com/) @ whichstiel. You may also like the Supernatural recap and gif blog I co-write/curate, [Shirtless Sammy](https://shirtlesssammy.tumblr.com/).


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